C@P Capped – Corporate Welfare More Important

So Industry Minister Lisa Setlakwe says that the Community Access Program (C@P) program has “achieved its objectives” and has cancelled it sans consultation and warning. Is the Internet now irrelevant? I guess Industry Canada needs the money to finance the endless task of subsidizing corporate Canada. That endless task is permanently open-ended.
Below is a partial list of The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) member corporations and an account of the sums they received from 1997 to 2001 in the form of grants and low interest loans.
Bombardier March 26, 1997 $87, 000,000
CAE March 30, 2001 $73, 400,000
IBM Canada March 9, 2001 $33, 000,000
Recent totals are available but the abysmal repayment rate for these so-called loans as calculated by the CTF ranges from 7-20 per cent. A frequent TPC phenomenon is the generous extension of repayment terms and/or the transformation of difficult loans into grants.
This list merely represents a few of those corporations with direct CCCE membership and is in no way a complete representation of Canadian public subsidy for private profit beneficiaries. Of special note are the following CCCE member energy companies who each receive an unspecified share of the, “…up to $2 billion [yearly] in government subsidies or tax incentives.” (Ottawa Citizen, Oct. 5, 2010. A3) these companies include:
Canadian Oil Sands Ltd.
Encana Corporation
Shell Canada Ltd.
While corporate Canada continues to simultaneously avoid research and development investment while endlessly demanding more tax cuts; the regime of public subsidy for private profit continues unabated under the Harper government’s recent Economic Action Plan. Such behaviour both supports and encourages belief in the mythology of the so-called free market. According to Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute, “Bailouts and subsidies to business by Canadian governments surpassed $200 billion between 1994 and 2007, adding up to $15,126 per taxpayer…our governments have a long history of spending public money on corporate welfare in attempts to pick winners and losers among various business sectors.”(Ottawa Citizen. Oct. 28, 2009. A4.)